


No hero of mine

by pengukat



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Endgame: Villaneve, F/F, Failed attempt at Supergirl crossover, Villaneve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-13
Updated: 2018-08-13
Packaged: 2019-06-26 17:43:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15668115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pengukat/pseuds/pengukat
Summary: In a world where Villanelle is a superhero, Eve is still obsessed with her.





	No hero of mine

**Author's Note:**

> Argh. I'm so undisciplined, I'm just going to leave a trail of half formed ideas all across the KE fandom and maybe finish none of them? Yaaay!
> 
> I've wanted to write a Killing Eve/Supergirl crossover since the season ended, and for various reasons that has not panned out, mainly because I ditched Supergirl before S2 ended. This resulted instead!

Eve smoothed down her button-down shirt and her slacks as best as she could, and tried to get her untamable hair under control in a messy bun. She checked her pallid reflection in the bathroom mirror, and swallowed. It was do or die. It was now or never.

There was no turning back. 

At 11:38AM, just outside the office of the Fashion News Editor-in-Chief, Eve steeled herself for her 11:40AM meeting with the woman inside - a woman with a reputation for being terrifyingly efficient, terrifyingly attractive, and also just outright terrifying. It wasn't her reputation that had Eve quaking in her low-heeled, sensible shoes, though. 

At precisely 11:40, Eve took a deep breath, and knocked.

"Enter." The lyrical command, issued in a crisp Russian accent, was promptly obeyed. Eve opened the door and slipped inside. "And close the door behind you."

So much for any witnesses, then.

With the door snapping shut behind her with a quiet finality, Eve's eyes roamed around the corner office's high glass windows, the walls covered from inch to inch with past magazine covers and eclectic artwork that Eve didn't understand, the glass desk covered in glossy photographs and papers near the back of the room, and behind it, the woman herself, not looking up at Eve at all. "I have a hard stop at 11:55, so let's make this quick."

Eve had never formally met Oksana Astankova, even though she had long been fascinated by the buzz swirling around her, and so she took the opportunity to quietly observe the woman before her.

Except for company-wide meetings and events, the forced socialisation at the annual Winter Holiday party, and the occasional brush of the elbow in the hallway in the rare occasions their orbits crossed, Eve had rarely had the chance to interact with the foreign-born editor-in-chief of the publishing firm's fashion magazine, whose star had risen astronomically fast since she had joined eighteen months ago. Her large hazel eyes were even larger behind her dark thick-rimmed glasses, unblinking in their laser-like focus on the spread of photos laid out on her desk. Her blond-brown hair cascaded over her shoulders and suit jacket, which was ... brown and red and dark and colourful and expensive-looking, and that was the extent of what Eve could identify about it because opting out of having to care about fashion was one of the main perks of working in a non-customer-facing job in the IT department. In any case, the well-fitting suit hugged her figure, accentuating her long legs and wow, Eve really had to set aside the woman's attractiveness out of mind and stay on topic.

Because Oksana was beautiful, but she was also ruthless and exacting. And she was young - in her mid-20s, at most - but she was respected. She demanded no less than perfection and brooked no nonsense from her staff, and she got what she asked for. She had an uncanny ability to weed out underperformers from her team and replace them with people possessing her own intense work ethic and identical high standards. She also had a reputation as an equal-opportunity man-and-lady-killer - it was rumoured that HR had hushed up at least 4 separate workplace harassment incidents on her behalf. And yet, her excellence was rewarded, and here Oksana remained. Every new detail about Oksana that Eve learnt through the grapevine had left her in awe. 

In any case, normally, Eve had little reason or opportunity to interact with Oksana. As a mere (albeit senior-level) behind-the-scenes IT department staff member, it was rare that Eve's duties would bring her in direct contact with non-technical staff. Usually someone with more fancy letters in their title had the "privilege" and "pleasure" of providing face-to-face support to the top-level staff. Occasionally Eve's name would be attached to an urgent company-wide blast warning about security breaches or malicious emails making the rounds, so while she was aware on some level that she probably wasn't a complete unknown to Oksana, it still came as a surprise to Eve she had been granted this meeting at all. Oksana was famously hands-on with her own affairs and managed her own schedule - unlike other higher-ups who all had administrative assistants to handle their menial tasks - and she was very protective of her time, frequently ending meetings that she felt were wasting it. Maybe Eve's cryptic subject line of "Critical security breach of your data, must discuss" had gotten her attention. 

Well, no use wondering now. Eve had 14 minutes left. Might as well get straight to the point. She took a deep breath, and just came right out with it.

"I know who you are. Who you really are. Your secret identity."

Oksana darted a fleeting glance at Eve, her mouth curving into a soft smile that didn't meet her eyes. "You're not the first person to think so. I know, I know, it's the hair. And the face. And maybe the legs. Listen, I'm very flattered that you would confuse me with a flying, superpowered, crime-fighting hero, but I'm not her!" She flashed an easy, practiced grin at Eve. "Now, if you'll excuse me -"

"Oh, I'm not talking about La Villanelle, you're obviously her," Eve waved her her hands. That wasn't what was interesting to her. That wasn't what Eve had come here for. "I'm talking about the - the other stuff you do. On the side." She trailed off abruptly. Even though she knew it deep in her core, she had never said it aloud before, and saying it would change everything. "You ... you kill people. Like, really, not just in the figurative, you're-super-mean and you-yell-at-them-in-meetings way. You're an honest-to-goodness serial killer responsible for over half the unsolved murders in this city over the past two years."

Oksana's face, nonplussed at Eve's nonchalant dismissal of her superhero persona, had twitched microscopically, once, during Eve's breathless exclamation; then, her mouth had slowly widened until her grin nearly swallowed her face. " _Villanelle_."

"Excuse me?"

"The superhero name is Villanelle."

"That's what I said, didn't I?"

"You sald 'La' Villanelle." Now Oksana was sounding impatient. "La Villanelle is the perfume."

This was a very odd thing to be quibbling about, but evidently Oksana cared deeply about this. "Fine, Villanelle, La Villanelle, whatever. Are you using your superhero identity as a cover to commit murders?"   

Oksana laughed out loud. It was a genuine, full-body laugh that originated in her stomach and rippled throughout her entire body. "You - are - hilarious! Tell me how you say your name. I want to make sure I'm saying it right."

Eve squirmed uncomfortably under the scrutiny. "Eve Polastri."

"Eve Polastri," Oksana repeated, like it was a nice piece of clothing she was trying on. "You go to the effort of scheduling a face to face meeting with me, just to accuse me of such a thing. Most unconventional."

"You're not denying it," Eve pointed out. 

Oksana stood up, scattering her photos to the side. "Is everything okay with you? Getting along with your coworkers okay? Is everything alright at home?" She cocked her head sideways, leaning forward eagerly. "Are you having marital problems? Performance issues in bed? Tricky menstruation cycle?"

Eve sputtered. "That - that is highly inappropriate, and has nothing to with anything, and - why aren't you denying anything?" 

"I'm honestly just completely confused by what your end goal is here," Oksana idly scratched her ear. "Are you trying to get fired? Killed? Both?" 

Eve swallowed. "Are you going to kill me?"

Oksana belly-laughed again, wiping actual tears from her eyes. "You really think you can waltz into my office, ask me questions like that, and get the answers you are looking for? What are you trying to accomplish here, Eve Polastri?" 

It was a question Eve had asked herself countless times over the past weeks, the past day - even in the final minutes ticking down to this meeting. Everything rumbling inside her skull from the past few weeks - the niggling doubts, the increasing horror, and the settling certainty - constantly on the forefront of her brain, on the tip of her tongue, on the surface of her skin - everything she had kept bottled up needed an escape route. In the end, it had been really simple.

"I, I just - I just want to know. No, I -" Eve threw her hands into the air. "I need to know. I need to know if what I see right in front of me is the truth. I need you to tell me the truth. I need to know - I need to know I'm right." 

Oksana's eyes danced with amusement. "So. You're convinced I'm a super-powered murderer. But you're not saying you're here to stop me from killing people."

"You're La Villanelle," Eve said simply, a tsunami of calmness crashing over her. "How can I stop you doing anything?"

"Villanelle," Oksana corrected, again, a touch crossly. But she had raised a single, perfectly-sculpted eyebrow, and her alert, feline eyes were watching Eve closely now. She raised her hand to her glasses, and suddenly Eve knew what was about to happen, but her eyes blinked anyway -

\- and then Oksana was on the other side of her desk, without making a single movement, without taking a single step, and Eve nearly stopped breathing.

The world-famous, mysterious, faster-than-a-speeding-bullet Villanelle - her familiar face, beaming from magazine covers and news reports, always smiling, always heroic - was now before her in person for the very first time, completely recognisable even without her trademark, sleek, jet-black full-body suit. It was one thing for Eve to be vaguely aware that she worked in the same company as the superhero protector of the region (and the whole country, but really, the the world), and quite another to have it confirmed to her in the flesh. It suddenly dawned on Eve that she was in the actual presence of divinity, the knowledge settling in her bones so she knew it like the back of her own hand, and it was awful and terrifying. 

There was nothing between them except 10 feet of space. 

"I have proof," Eve threw out, like a useless defensive shield that Villanelle would undoubtedly tear right through. 

"Ooh." Oksana's voice stirred something deep inside Eve, and she felt as if Oksana could see right through her. "Ooh, I highly doubt that." 

"Fine. I have a lot of circumstantial evidence," Eve corrected, stubbornly. "It's all on my computer hard drive."

"Should I say thank you for telling me where you keep it?"

"Backed up to onsite backup storage, mixed in with our magazine content, so there's no good way to isolate it, and it's synced to multiple cloud regions and datacenters across the globe. So if someone wanted to delete it, there's no easy way to get to all of it. Even for a superhero. "

"Yet it sounds like the data can't be easily gotten to by anyone else, either," Oksana noted.

"I have instructions ready, all ready to go," Eve continued, her voice quavering just slightly. "How to access all my data, and a compressed subset of it, all written up. At noon, on the dot, a scheduled task is going to fire off a mass email to everyone in the company, and the police, and all the major news outlets, if I am not back at my desk to stop it." 

"When it will be dismissed as pure nonsense. The rants of a disgruntled employee who has finally gone around the deep end with a personal vendetta against me." Oksana leaned back against the desk and crossed her arms. "I have to commend you though. Usually when someone in IT quits in a a blaze of glory, they do something like, change everyone's passwords, delete everyone's data, hack into the CEO's social media accounts and post something ridiculous, something like that. This public suicide option is pretty funny. I like it! My favourite part is how you've dragged me into it." 

"It'll be convincing," Eve spat. "Trust me. People will finally see what they should have seen all along - what's been in their faces all this time." 

"Interesting." Oksana purred. "Tell all about this convincing circumstantial evidence you've compiled, then. All about this revealing data that allowed you to see what no one else could before. I want to know everything!" 

There was a dangerous, yet curious gleam in Oksana's eyes, and Eve realised with a start that even though she had no idea what was going to happen next, it was a relief to finally be able to say it out loud. She hadn't been able to tell anyone - not her husband, not her coworkers, not her friends - because it had seemed so outrageous, so unbelievable, that even Eve thought she might have been imagining it, until the coincidences were impossible to ignore. And when the data seemed to confirm her theories, the one overriding urge hadn't been to go straight to the police with her findings, not to stop the terrible things happening - but to look directly into the eyes of the woman in question and uncover the truth for herself.

"There's a - there's a pattern to La - ah, Villanelle's actions," Eve said slowly. "After every 6 times Villanelle does her - I mean, you, you do your thing -"

"My 'thing'?" Oksana's voice rose with her eyebrow. Eve could hear the air quotes around the word.

"You know," Eve gestured vaguely, "stopping a robbery, pulling a kid from a car accident, saving a cat from a tree, blowing out the fire in a burning building, stopping a plane crash -" 

"Eve Polastri, why do I get the feeling that you do not have a healthy appreciation for the things I do? I work so hard to keep everyone safe, you know." Oksana smiled Villanelle's familiar picture-perfect smile, the one the world known and adored by the world over, the one that had always struck Eve as somewhat alien and unreal. But it was too hard to explain to someone "you've just always seemed off to me, and I don't know why" as a reasonable explanation for why she didn't trust them, not to mention a little indefensibly discriminatory, so Eve did not respond, and just continued. 

"After every 6 heroic amazing actions you perform, someone just ... dies. Completely randomly. Out of the blue."

"People are always dying, Eve Polastri." Maybe Oksana was trying to imbue the words with some kind of hidden meaning, maybe she wasn't, but a shiver went down Eve's spine all the same. 

"These deaths aren't ... natural. I'm not talking about someone dying of old age peacefully in their beds, or from some disease. They're ... messy, bloody, or violent. They're prolonged; people take a while to die, like they're made to be fully aware of it while its happening. Sometimes they're ... whimsical, almost?" Eve was half-speaking to herself now, as she tried to find the right words. "Taking place in some place significant to the victim, or with some kind of ironic meaning. A violinist strangled with horse tail hairs, or a swimmer drowned in their bathtub, or a pilot falling from a great height -" 

Villanelle shook with laughter, slapping her thigh. "Life can be funny that way!" 

"And some of the deaths - kills -" Eve corrected, "- have been so nonsensical and improbable that they can only be explained by supernatural forces. Or superhuman powers." Eve glanced at Oksana meaningfully. "I only know one superhero who frequents these parts."

"Then explain to me," Oksana opened her arms, "why am I, Villanelle, not already prime suspect number 1? Why have not the police come after me for these inexplicable, impossible killings?" 

"I don't think I'm the only one that suspects," Eve frowned, "but no one - no one wants to believe it. No one CAN believe it - that their beloved superhero saviour is capable of doing such things."

"And yet _you_ do," Oksana said. "Why is that?"

Eve pressed on. "More often than not, the death occurs either geographically or temporally close to your 6th save." Eve swallowed. "Almost like you can't wait to get your hands on someone. You just go out, and find someone random, and -" 

"I do wish you wouldn't keep speaking as if my guilt is already certain," Oksana sighed. "Forgive me, your honour, but what's my motive in all this?"

Eve shook her head. "I don't - I don't know what you're thinking. I don't want to assume."

"Even after the assuming you've already done!" Oksana clapped her hands. "Surely you have some theory, hm? Some reason you've concocted in your brain that explains my motivation for all these things?"

"You enjoy killing," Eve rasped. "You love it. But your powers - they give you a god complex. You love the attention you get from being everyone's saviour. So you help people, and no one suspects a thing, because why would a superhero who goes around saving people murder people instead? So you do 6 good deeds, earning you your goodwill and praise and adulation, and for your 7th deed - the saviour gets a rest. Like you've earned your reward for all the good you've done. Like a god who works for 6 days and rests on the 7th."

Oksana blinked, her smile freezing. "Biblical. Befitting of your name. But none of this constitutes circumstantial evidence, much less proof." 

"Ah, well. Ah. That. Well." This part made Eve squirm a little in professional shame. "Your job - travel a lot. Sometimes, your job takes you to places where some of the deaths have taken place. And, anyway, you're Villanelle, so you can fly anywhere in the blink of an eye if you have to. And sometimes you take your cell phone with you. Though, honestly, I have no idea where you carry it, it's not like there are any pockets on your suit, and believe me, I've spent so much time trying to figure out where you'd hide it, because I had to be sure that - wait, no, not that I spent a ton of time looking at pictures of your body in your suit, I mean, oh my god, please don't get the wrong idea -" 

The look of sheer amusement on Oksana's face snapped Eve back to the task at hand. 

"One or two isolated incidents wouldn't be proof, but a pattern over this amount of time can't be a coincidence. People won't be able to explain it away anymore, and they're going to start asking questions. You're always in the right place at the right time. I've been able to pinpoint your location during every single Villanelle incident and every unexplained murder for the past four months, and it all lines up -"

"And how exactly have you been able to do that, Eve Polastri?" 

"Ah. That. Right. Well. Okay, so we - in IT - we can track the location of all company-issued cell phones," Eve said, her face turning a little red. "And, ah. I have access to your schedule - your calendar. Your personal account. So I know where you've been. When you've been there."

"You've been reading my emails?" Oksana's grin was so wide it was splitting her face in two. "This is a massive breach of trust for a - what was your title again?"

"Senior IT services, networking, and security admininistrator,"  Eve said sheepishly.  

"Well, Eve Polastri, senior IT administrator of a bunch of things, you are so, so fired." 

"... right, okay, fair," Eve said. "But am I right?" 

Oksana laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

Finally, her waves of laughter subsided. "It's 11:53. I have another commitment. One last question." Oksana took a step in Eve's direction, and Eve immediately stepped backwards, until her back was against the door. "What was it that convinced you I'm Villanelle, when no one else has been able to see through my disguise?"

Eve accidentally guffawed, though it was more a crazed extended cackle than genuine amusement. "Are you kidding me? A pair of glasses isn't a disguise. I figured out you were her, like, three months after you started working here."

Oksana's eyes widened, and her smile disappeared.

Eve, so engrossed in her memory of her initial discovery, barely noticed. "You know, I honestly thought everyone was playing a practical joke on me the first time I saw you in person. It was some monthly senior leadership meeting where I had to give a report, or whatever, I don't remember. I recognised you instantly, but somehow everyone in the room was just acting like you were this normal human being, instead of a freaking superhero, and I was like, what is going on?! Is this a joke?! But then, I realised people genuinely couldn't tell! They weren't faking it! So, then, I thought, maybe I was just imagining it, but then I saw you again, like just walking down the hallway, maybe a couple of weeks later, and I mean - it was so obvious. You have the same hair, the same face, the same eyes - I mean, the way you walk, even the way your mouth does this thing when you smile -" 

This time, Eve's eyes happened to remained open, and so she saw a brown-red-blond-colourful blur streak in her direction, and her next breath of air gusted directly into Oksana - Villanelle's - face, right above her own. They were practically nose to nose, Oksana standing barely inches from her, staring her down, tilting her head from side to side, shifting her weight from left to right, eyes piercing right through Eve. 

With Oksana's superior height forcing Eve's neck to crane up to maintain the eye contact that she didn't dare break, Eve gulped, and stopped talking.

"I told you that people have told me they thought I was Villanelle before, right?" Oksana murmured.

Eve nodded mutely.

"Every single one of them that asked me if I was her - none of them were certain. All they did was suspect. Not like you."

Eve tried to control her breathing, even as her heart threatened to hammer out of her chest. 

"They were all, 'hey, this is weird, but - are you her?' And they all got embarrassed, and took my word for it when I told them I wasn't. Do you know what I did to them?"

Eve shook her head, not sure she wanted the answer.

Oksana bared her teeth. "I killed them. I killed them all. Smashed them into fine, tiny grains of powder, starting with their brain in their skulls, all the way down their bodies, leaving no trace of their existence, no bodies for their families to find. None of them show up in your data. Do you know why? Because they're all just filed as missing persons. Never to return home." 

Eve whimpered, her legs turning to jelly. "What are you going to do to me?"

Oksana closed her eyes, leaned in, and inhaled. Eve's eyes fluttered shut, out of - fear, the unknown, the anticipation of - who knew. 

"Ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum - do you know what that is? - ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum -"

It was the speed of her pulse in time to Oksana's voice.

"Why did you come here? I ask you again. Are you unhappy at work? At home? In your marriage? In life? Did you want some kind of change? Why did you come to me, Eve Polastri?"

"I don't - I don't know -" Eve gasped.

"You do. You do know. Why did you come to me? Why are you here?"

Oksana's mouth was so, so close to her ear, that Eve knew, if she moved, they would touch. "I think - I just - I just wanted to see what you would do." 

"What did you think I would do?"

"I - I -"

"What did you want me to do?"

"It's - just - your schedule - you - Villanelle has appeared 5 times since the last mysterious killing, and I thought - maybe - if I kept you here, instead of letting you go off and perform your 6th-"

Oksana's face appeared before Eve's vision again, her gaze again piercing right through Eve. "No. That's not it. Not the only thing. You want something from me. I can smell it on you. Tell me what you want." 

" _You_ tell me what I want, if you're so sure," Eve muttered, indignant and maybe a little angry at this woman acting like she knew Eve better than Eve knew herself, when Eve didn't even know, when all Eve had known was that she just had to come before the woman and ask her to her face, _am I right?_ -

"Tell me if I'm right," Eve pleaded.

"What will you do once I tell you?" 

"I don't know, I don't know," Eve said helplessly. "I just want to know, I just want to know everything, I just want to know everything about you." 

Oksana's eyes roamed Eve's face, Eve's neck, every inch of Eve's body. "And after that? What would you do if I told you everything?"

"I - don't - know!" Eve exploded, half out of nervousness and half in frustration. "I legitimately did not think this far through, okay? Why don't you try telling me everything first, and find out for yourself?" Without thinking, she shoved at Oksana with all her might, before she realised what she was doing, and covered her mouth, horrified. Oksana, made of steel, didn't budge an inch; the only thing that moved was the quirk at the corner of her mouth. 

"Please don't kill me for that. I didn't mean to. Please don't hurt me."

Oksana, still smirking, bit gently on her lower lip, her eyes filled with questions. Eve couldn't look away.

Finally Oksana let out a slow breath. "You are a strange one, Eve Polastri." She glanced at her watch. "Do you want to grab some lunch with me?"

"I - what?"

"Yes or no?"

"Um - if I say no, will I die?"

"I promise I'll tell you before I kill you. And I promise it won't hurt." 

 _Before_.Not _if_.

And yet ...

"What about your commitment?"

Oksana shrugged. "Cancelled."

"What are you playing at?"

"Nothing, Eve," Oksana smiled. "I just want to have lunch with you. Just talk. Get to know you a bit. And maybe you can get to know me too."

... Eve wasn't scared. Maybe, just maybe, she had piqued the curiosity of this exotic, all-powerful, alien creature before her, just enough to stay alive. Maybe that would buy her enough time. Or maybe it would all end in pain and tears. Eve found, to her mute surprise, that it didn't matter.

The only thing that mattered was knowing. 

"Yes, of course, yes -"

"Good -"

Villanelle's hands were on her hips, and suddenly Eve was seated in her cubicle in front of her computer, her hair a wild untangled mess around her face, and filled with the violent urge to throw up. Oksana was leaning beside her. A couple of her colleagues glanced up, but no one else in the cubicles next to her seemed to notice their sudden appearance or find their presence out of the ordinary. Typical freaking IT staff, buried in their monitors and headphones, dead to the world to everything around them.

Now Eve knew how it felt when Villanelle moved through the world. It felt weird. Alien. Extraordinary. Unbelievable.

And since Eve wasn't a super-powered flying being, she was just a human whose hair and stomach might misbehave after traveling at speeds too fast for a human body to sustain, nauseating.

"Can you cancel that email you were going to send out?" Oksana whispered in her ear. "The one that would embarrass me to the company, and the entire world. I mean, I like my job. I want to continue doing it without any hassle. If you do this, I promise not to fire you."

With shaking fingers, Eve tapped in her password, got it wrong a few times, ("Can you please look the other way? It makes me really nervous when someone is watching?" she whispered through the motion sickness), finally managed to log in, and with seconds to spare, canceled her scheduled task. 

"Thanks, Eve." Oksana touched her shoulder lightly in surely what was meant to be a comforting manner, but instead it burned where she touched. "Now, what would you like for lunch? Sandwiches? Italian? There's this Thai place I've been dying to try out."  

Eve wished she didn't love the way her name sounded in Oksana's mouth. "Thai sounds great," she squeaked.

"Awesome. Vegas it is, then," Oksana whispered. 

"Wait, what? That's a 4 hour drive, and I have a meeting later at - oh, shit, please don't tell me that we're going to - I think I'm going to be sick -"

"I'll get you back in time, don't worry," Oksana grinned. "Ready to go?"

Eve's heart clenched, and thumped wildly. Oksana's smile widened. She had heard. She must have. The whole room must have heard.

Oksana's smile was -

It was nothing like the one that Villanelle showed the world.

Eve wanted it all to herself.

"Yeah, I'm ready," Eve said, knowing that she was going to pay dearly for this, and that she wasn't going to regret a thing. "Take me there." 

**Author's Note:**

> Edit since the initial posting: replaced a word with "motion sickness" instead because that is actually the right term for it.


End file.
